Keynesian economist Paul Krugman should win another Nobel Prize for this. He’s going to be studying income inequality for the next few months, but instead of choosing to study it from the low end like most everybody else does, he’s going to be paid some $24,000 a month to observe and evaluate the view from the top:

New York Times author and liberal economist Paul Krugman has been offered a position as a distinguished scholar for a nine-month stint at the City University of New York’s Luxembourg Income Study Center, which researches income inequality.

Krugman has also been nominated to become a distinguished professor for LIS, which would bring with it a hefty $225,000 salary. (Krugman’s nomination was first reported by Gawker.)

That means that Krugman, while working to research income inequality, will earn nearly five times the median household income of residents of New York City — for nine month’s work.

That’s why Paul Krugman is a brilliant economist! Sure, anybody could have studied income inequality from the low end of the scale, but these days almost everybody does that. Krugman, taking one for the team, knows that there are enough people in the 99 percent (the sample size is more than adequate), so instead he’ll gather data from the perspective of the one percent. Krugman will also apparently study workload inequality while he’s at it.

Hopefully Krugman will kick off the new gig by finding out what a woman would have been paid for the same job. I expect that report to be released sometime after Halley’s Comet makes another swing through out neighborhood.

In case you were wondering, Krugman isn’t a hypocrite, because somebody at Slate said so: